BMX Racing History · Rider Profile · Legend Bike Co

Brian Lopes

Here is something I don't say lightly. When I built the very first Supercross BMX frame back in 1989, Brian Lopes was one of the kids it was built to put on the gate. Him, Billy Harrison, Glenn Pavlosky, Brian "Bogi" Givens, Kiyomi Waller. That was the TECH Racing team, and that frame was the reason Supercross exists at all. So I have a soft spot for this one. I watched this kid up close.

And let me tell you, he could go.

Lopes started at four and a half years old. A Schwinn Pixie and a Rams football helmet, out at Saddleback Park. By the time he hit the National scene as a teenager, the speed was obvious to anybody paying attention. He came up through SE Racing. Toby Henderson, who was helping out at a local shop with gate starts, saw what the kid had and pointed SE his direction. That is how these things happened back then. Word of mouth and a fast kid.

I have my own SE story tangled up in this. At SE Racing's late-1980s restart — Bill dates it to 1988 — Mike Devitt built a stretched PK Ripper for Brian Lopes, the Long PK. Longer wheelbase, more room to move. And it worked great. Watching that bike work was part of what pushed me to design the SE Assassin, and the Assassin was part of what led me to start Supercross. So Lopes is woven into my early story whether he knows it or not. The fast kid on the stretched Long PK helped point me down the road I'm still on.

Pro at 17, the same year I started Supercross

Brian turned pro at seventeen. That was 1989 — the exact year I founded Supercross BMX. Two things happening at once, both of them just getting started.

His first pro race, he took second. Within five races he was AA, the top class. That is not normal. Most riders grind for a year or two to crack AA. Lopes did it in a month of weekends. He raced as a pro on Elf Bicycles, then moved over to Mongoose. And that move is where the whole story turns, because Mongoose is what got him onto a mountain bike.

The switch that made him a legend

Brian had heard the ex-BMX guys were making real money racing mountain bikes. Mongoose gave him a shot. He took it. He made his pro mountain bike racing debut in 1993, and what happened after that is one of the best second acts in the history of the sport.

Four UCI Mountain Bike World Championship titles. Six UCI World Cup overall titles. Nine NORBA National Championships, in both downhill and dual slalom. He owned dual slalom and then four-cross — the close-quarters, bar-to-bar gravity stuff that looks the most like BMX of anything in mountain biking. Which makes sense. That is exactly where a BMX kid's instincts pay off. He even held world records for bunny hopping, height and distance both — records Steve Veltman broke in 1996. USA Today once called him the best all-around world-class cycling athlete out there.

Think about what that takes. He didn't just dabble. He went from BMX pro to the most-winning male racer in mountain bike World Cup history. The BMX gate built the foundation. He said as much himself.

Both halls of fame

Here is the part that ties the whole thing in a bow. In 2008, Brian Lopes was inducted into the BMX Hall of Fame and the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in the same year. Two sports. Two halls. One rider.

Not many people pull that off. You can count them without using all your fingers. To be great enough in BMX to make the hall, then go to a completely different sport and be great enough to make that hall too — that is rare air. The BMX world claimed him. The mountain bike world claimed him. Both were right.

October 21, 1995 — the clipless pedal moment

Here's a detail that doesn't get told enough. On October 21, 1995, at the ABA Fall Nationals in Burbank, California, Brian Lopes and Mike King became the first riders to race a BMX national on clipless pedals. It sounds small — a pedal system, not a frame or a title — but it wasn't small. It was the first clear, on-the-gate sign that BMX and mountain biking, cousin sports that had mostly stayed in their own lanes, were about to blur into each other. King went on to become the USA Cycling BMX program director and run Team USA through the 2008 and 2012 Olympics. Lopes took that same locked-in connection to the pedal into dual slalom and four-cross, the two mountain bike disciplines that reward exactly the kind of explosive, bar-to-bar gate start a BMX racer already has wired into him. Same instinct, new bike, bigger tires.

Signature gear and a career that didn't quit

Most sources place the four UCI World Championship titles as 2001 in dual slalom, then 2002, 2005, and 2007 in four-cross — a run that's repeated consistently enough across the mountain bike press that it's worth stating plainly here, even though we haven't found a single official UCI results archive that lays out all four in one place. Brian also won two NEA World Extreme Sports Awards for Mountain Biker of the Year, in 2000 and 2001, picked up an ESPY nomination for Action Sports Athlete of the Year in 2001, and showed up as a playable rider in Sony's Downhill Domination video game. He co-wrote Mastering Mountain Bike Skills with Lee McCormack, a book that did well enough to get translated into six languages.

The staying power is the part that really stands out. Lopes carried factory support for more than two decades — Mongoose early, then a long run backed by sponsors like Ibis, Oakley, SRAM, Kenda, and ODI, who put his name on a signature grip and knee pad. On April 13, 2012, at age 40, he won the first-ever UCI cross-country eliminator World Cup race in Houffalize, Belgium — a brand-new discipline, and he won its debut event. He was still racing and landing on podiums in enduro and cyclocross events as late as 2015. Twenty-two years on a mountain bike, after seven years on a BMX bike before that. Not many careers in either sport run that long.

I'm proud the Supercross story brushed up against his early on. The kid on the stretched Ripper turned into one of one. Funny how that works.

Sources

• Early Supercross BMX history, the TECH Racing team, the stretched SE PK Ripper, and the SE Assassin connection — firsthand account from Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX.
• ABA BMX Hall of Fame 2008 induction press release (Brian Lopes bio: Saddleback Park, age 4½, SE Racing, Toby Henderson, turned pro at 17, Elf Bicycles, Mongoose) — leelikesbikes.com/brian-lopes-inducted-into-the-bmx-hall-of-fame.html
• Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, 2008 inductee profile (over 25 World Cup wins, four World Championship titles, nine National Champion titles, 1993 pro debut) — mmbhof.org/mountain-bike-hall-of-fame/2008/brian-lopes/
• Brian Lopes, Wikipedia (born Sept 6, 1971, Mission Viejo; turned pro at 17; MTB from 1993; 9 NORBA / 6 World Cup / 4 World Championship titles; bunny hop world records; April 2012 cross-country eliminator win in Houffalize, Belgium; ESPY nomination; NEA awards; Mastering Mountain Bike Skills book) — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Lopes
• brianlopes.com — official site (nine National titles, six UCI World Cup wins, four UCI World Champion titles, signature knee pads, current and former sponsor list, racing results through 2015).
• Legend Bike Co — "The History of BMX" and "Supercross BMX" pages (Oct. 21, 1995 clipless-pedal detail, Burbank, California location, and the Mike King connection, kept consistent across all three pages).
• Legend Bike Co — our own Steve Veltman page, cross-checked for the 1996 bunny hop world record.